Our 1959 feature on the rooms of Oxbridge undergraduates

By Catriona Gray

22 August 2016

In October 1959 House & Garden ran a feature on
interior design in university accommodation. The magazine visited
the world's oldest universities, to see how undergraduates lived in
their converted medieval quarters and recently built bed-sitters,
providing a unique insight into how rooms at Oxford and Cambridge
were decorated at the time.

The images are now republished in
Fifties House, a new book which opens the magazine's
peerless archives for the first time. In the book, author Catriona
Gray charts the post-war consumer boom in a country with a
collective desire for new, innovative design. In short: a visual
revolution captured on the pages of the magazine. In an exclusive
extract we revisit the feature...

'Behind the 17th-century
façade of this 1959 bedsit in Corpus Christi, Oxford, is a
surprisingly modern room with functional furniture and a red
Anglepoise lamp for studying by. A green wall provides a bold shot
of colour in an otherwise neutral space.'

'The discomforts of Oxford and Cambridge colleges are legendary
and, unlike most legends, well authenticated. The most vociferous
denigrators are neither Fellows nor undergraduates, but
businessmen-planners quartered in the colleges for summer schools
and conferences. A wartime naval officer, temporarily housed in
Hertford College, Oxford, begged to be allowed to return to the
amenities of his cabin in a warship in the North Atlantic. Most
colleges are afraid of colour and modern design. That is the real
trouble, despite the fact that there are Common or Combination
Rooms at both Oxford and Cambridge which are quite certainly of our
own time. Lincoln College, Oxford, has a Common Room which has been
described by one don, with an air of disapproval, as being
indistinguishable from the waiting room of a small, rather
exclusive airport. Another trouble is that the decorating of
college rooms is decided by Committee. In one college, it is
alleged, the Committee appointed to deal with lighting for the Hall
in 1912 has just been reappointed - to a man - to renew that
lighting. It is also true that the efforts towards enlivening the
decoration of undergraduates' rooms do not always meet with the
success they deserve. Agglomerations of eight weeks' non-washing up
will mar the best-laid scheme.

Undergraduates
unwind in a modern block of student housing in Clare College,
Cambridge.

'College furniture is usually basic or hideous or both. Of
course college furniture has to last - but need it be so
unyieldingly obnoxious? Especially the three-piece suites.
Occasionally, bachelor dons can afford to lavish time and cash on
furnishing and redecorating, rooting out good bits of college
furniture and dusty, deep-stored college pictures. (One Fellow
found and hung with pride a very large-scale picture of Joseph and
Potiphar's wife, with the peculiar aim, it is said, of embarrassing
his female pupils.) More forceful dons can and do persuade their
colleges into the use of colour.

'Books,
books and more books dominate these Oxford rooms' reads the
original caption to this 1959 feature on the accommodation of
students.

'More time and trouble is now spent on housing and cosseting
undergraduates than at any time in the universities' long history.
In the newer buildings there has been a return to what Christopher
Hobhouse called the 'medieval simplicity of the hateful
bed-sitter'. But beautiful rooms suffer from an undergraduate lack
of time and money. Many undergraduates now spend only one year in
college and few can afford to redecorate their rooms on that
fleeting basis. While the unimpeded reconstructions of the
exteriors continues, and new colleges are built, influxes of fresh
undergraduates and Fellows will have the opportunity of taking over
some of the most attractive and challenging rooms in the world as
well as some of the least promising. Is it too much to hope that in
time the interiors may come to match the impact of the
architecture? Cream and brown are not a legacy that should be
passed on.'

With its
clever shelving unit providing ample storage for books, svelte,
black-legged furniture and abstract rugs covering the dark
floorboards, this room was captioned 'the most uncompromisingly
modern, clear-cut room in the University'. It belonged to David
Butler, who has been a Fellow of Nuffield since 1951 and is the
author of many highly regarded books on politics.

In
Oxford, brilliant primary colours and decorative motifs from the
Far East add an exotic atmosphere to the Holywell flat of
anthropologist Ronald Needham and his wife. The powder-pink walls
balance well with the rich blue carpet. Paper lampshades were
popular during the Fifties, but these decorative ones add to the
Asian influence in this flat.

Immediately
after the extended feature on the interiors of the world's two
oldest universities, House & Garden
suggested its own design for an undergraduate's bedsit, allowing
for sleeping, entertaining and studying. A divan can be concealed
as a sofa if desired, while the modern desk and cupboard units were
designed by the architectural firm Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall and
made by Bath cabinet Makers. The birch table is an Aalto-Artek
design; the shelving along the left-hand wall could be adjusted as
required; and the rush matting was from Heal's. Two Anglepoise
lamps, the black '1227a' on the desk and a cream '1209' on the
table, provide focused lighting.

Taken from House & Garden Fifties House, the first
title in the House & Garden Decades of Design
series by Catriona Gray, with foreword by Terence Conran (Conran
Octopus, £30).